Matt Mullenweg

While searching for a plugin at the wordpress site, I chanced upon this July 16, 2007 post by a certain Bobo, entitled “Is someone stealing your hard work?  Read this before you get angry.”

What caught me was the quote he got from Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress (WP), in response to some WP theme designer’s complaint about people deleting her name from the footer credits, and sometimes replacing it with their own.  Matt’s response reads, in part:

 

 

If you accept that bad people are going to be bad then the real question becomes how do you maximize the effect of the good instead of treating them just like the bad. (No one likes to be treated like a criminal.) In my brief experience here’s three things that work:

  1. Give people the tools they need to succeed. This can be interpreted on a lot of levels, but personally I’ve found at the most base the freedoms provided by the GPL and other open source licenses are incredibly empowering.
  2. Celebrate the successes. Talk, connect, promote, and embrace the people who are creating things on top of your creation. (The best revenge against someone doing something bad is helping create something awesome.)
  3. Provide a way for people to choose to help you, and try to remove as much friction from that process as possible. Now that you’ve ignored the bad people and delighted the good, by their very nature they’ll want to give something back.

But that is not the best part.  The best part is that those words came from the mouth of an awfully young (and good-looking) geek, who is probably the reason why blogs are sprouting like wild grass.   To become famous or earn money or both through blogging has never been that easy since WordPress hit cyber universe and expanded the blogosphere into stupendous proportions.

I mean, I would expect those words from someone like John Gray, or Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith, or William Ury, or Marianne Williamson….but from a computer geek?

It is when the youth speak with ancient wisdom that I know for certain there is still hope for the world.  Hallelujah!

Read Matt’s complete, remarkable treatise on the Price of Freedom.  While you’re at it, you might like to check out his ABOUT section, and be amazed.